The Merchants of Cool

They want to be cool.

They are impressionable and they have the cash.

They are corporate America's $150 billion dream.

Teenagers have a lot of disposable income.

They want to go spend their money.

And, you know, we're more than happy to make products that they want to go spend it on.

MTV, Madison Avenue and the dream makers of Hollywood have targeted our teenagers.

They look at the teen market as part of this massive empire that they're colonizing.

Teens are like Africa.

They are the most studied generation in history.

If you don't understand and recognize what they're thinking and what they're feeling, you're going to lose.

You're absolutely going to lose.

>> But what does this relentless focus on the teenager due to the culture?

They're going to do whatever they think works the fastest and with the most people, which means that they will drag standards down.

And to the teenagers themselves, I have to look good for people.

If I need to look good.

Tonight, author and media critic Douglas Rushkoff takes a journey through the complex world of buying and selling.

Cool.

Okay, so I want to take attendance here.

Christopher.

Okay.

Okay.

Adam.

Cox does not have a seat right over here.

Has anybody ever done a focus group before?

Do you remember what you talked about back to school supplies on a summer afternoon in a downtown New York loft?

Corporate America is on a very serious mission.

You know, it's all going to be sort of like what you guys think.

You guys are sort of the experts today and it's going to really be just you guys telling me your opinions.

These five boys are here to be questioned about what they wear, what they eat, what they listen to, and watch.

For $125 each they're expected to answer.

Tell me some of the things that are really hot right now, some things that are really big right now, popular trends, things that you sort of see everywhere.

What's like going on?

What's what's hot right now?

Just shout them out.

Okay, so there are no more responsive than most teenagers, but that's not going to stop this market researcher because the information he's looking for is worth an awful lot of money.

At 32 million strong.

This is the largest generation of teenagers ever, even larger than their baby boomer parents.

Last year, teens spent more than $100 billion themselves and pushed their parents to spend another 50 billion on top of that.

They have more money and more say over how they'll spend it than ever before.

Teens run today's economy there.

There's an innate feeling for moms and dads to please the teen, to keep the teen happy, to keep the teen home.

And I think you can pretty much take that to the bank.

They're given a lot of what we call guilt money.

Here's the credit card.

Why don't you go online and buy something?

Because I can't spend time with you.

I'm Douglas Rushkoff.

And tonight, we'll tour through a landscape that has both attracted and repelled me during the decade I've been studying it.

It's the world in which our teenagers are growing up a world made of marketing.

For today's teens.

A walk in the street may as well be a stroll through the mall.

Anywhere they rest their eyes, they'll be exposed to a marketing message.

A typical American teenager will process over 3000 discrete advertisements in a single day and 10 million by the time they are 18.

Kids are also consuming massive quantities of entertainment media.

75% of teens have a television in their room.

A third have their own personal computer where they spend an average of 2 hours a day online.

I think one of the great things about this information age is with so many channels, you can say my business is 12 to 15 or my business is 21 to 24.

As a result, you have the most marketed to group of teens and young adults ever in the history of the world.

It's a blizzard of brands all competing for the same kids.

To win teens loyalty marketers believe they have to speak their language the best, so they study them carefully.

As an anthropologist, would an exotic native culture.

If you don't understand and recognize what they're thinking and what they're feeling, and then be able to take that in and come up with a really precise message that you're trying to reach these kids with in their terms, you're going to lose.

You're absolutely going to lose.

Is there anybody in your group of friends in particular that is always really following the trends?

Not really.

No.

So it's just sort of all of you together kind of keep each other in check.

Okay.

Cool.

What makes this market so frustrating is that they don't operate the same way as the rest of us.

They're a stubborn demographic, unresponsive to brands and traditional marketing messages.

But there is one thing they do respond to.

Cool.

Only cool keeps changing.

So how do you map it?

PIN it down.

I'm moving up.

Stop me when we get to like, two years ago.

What is cool, anyway?

Like, right here.

Okay.

The search for this elusive prize has its own name.

Cool hunting.

Cool hunting is structured around really a search for a certain kind of personality and a certain kind of player in a given social network for years and years on Madison Avenue.

If you knew where the money was and where the power was and where the big houses were, then you knew what was going to happen next.

And coup hunting was all about a kind of revolution that sets that earlier paradigm aside and says, in fact, it has to do with the influence held by those who have the respect and admiration and trust of their friends.

Many companies don't trust themselves to do this kind of research, so they hire experts who can find these cool kids and speak their language.

We look for kids who are ahead of the pack because they're going to influence what all the other kids do.

We look for the 20%, the trendsetters that are going to influence the other 80%.

Dee Dee Gordon is a sought after cool hunter.

Just 30 years old, she commands high fees as a consultant to some of the largest corporations in America and has been the subject of a New Yorker profile.

How good is she?

I think she's as good as anyone is at this game.

And it's something it's a difficult thing to quantify.

Of course, it's not a science.

It's really a question ultimately of how much do you trust the person who's doing the interpretation and how good are their instincts?

And I think in both cases, she's at the top of the field.

Three years ago, Gordon and her partner, Sharon Lee, left the small advertising agency where they worked to start their own business.

Look, look, all the photos are really busy, so somebody has to shoot a skateboarder in the air or a cyclist in the air.

Gordon and Lee have put together a team of what they call correspondents, all young, all former cool kids themselves.

The Slipknot story came in and a writer did a really good job.

Their culture spies who penetrate the regions of the teen landscape where corporations aren't welcome.

Can I take your picture for a street culture website I work for?

Oh, hey, I'm here to get your piercings.

I get your tattoo.

A correspondent is a person who has been trained by us to be able to find a certain kind of kid.

A kid that we call a trendsetter or an early adopter.

This is a kid who's very forward in their thinking, who looks outside their own backyard for inspiration, who is a leader within their own group.

These kids are really difficult to find.

So what this correspondent does is they go out and they like find and identify these trendsetting kids.

They interview them, they get them interested in what we do.

They send all that stuff in, we look at it, we compile it, we look for trends or themes that are happening through all the information.

And that's the stuff that we put on our website.

For a subscription fee of $20,000 each.

Companies are granted access to the Look Look website A Rosetta Stone of Teen Culture.

If companies can get in on a trend or subculture while it is still underground, they can be the first ones to bring it to market.

And that's when the mass consumer picks up on it and runs with it and then eventually kills it.

And that's the paradox of cool hunting.

It kills what it finds.

As soon as marketers discover cool, it stops being cool.

The faster you pick up on these trends and blow them out and show them to everybody and reveal them the corporate America.

The more you force the kind of person who starts them and spreads them to move on and find the next.

So you simply there's no kind of solution to this.

You can't ever solve the puzzle permanently by by having by discovering.

Cool, cool.

You force cool to move on to the next thing.

For those who crossed out Madonna, why'd you cross out Madonna?

She's old.

She's old.

This creates a problem for marketers.

Kids begin to see them as the enemy.

So what do marketers do?

Market to kids without seeming to do so become cool themselves.

As Sprite did a few years ago.

I like the way you make me laugh.

In the early nineties, Sprite was an also ran brand in the competitive soft drink category.

Their focus groups with teenagers were designed to find out what was wrong.

What we found by talking to teens is that they had seen so much advertising that they were on overload and became very cynical about that traditional approach to advertising.

Hi, I'm Grant Hill, professional basketball player for the Detroit Pistons.

Then they launched this ad campaign aimed at teens, which pokes fun at marketing itself because it's the only drink with that cool, crisp, refreshing taste.

Satisfies even my manliest thirst.

There was really no one in the market at the time that was saying discount at all.

Don't believe it.

It's all BS.

And we know that.

You know that and you're smarter than everyone else.

So it put them in a position to feel like we understood them so that they were feeding back to us.

You know, Sprite understands me, and Sprite is one, you know, it's really one of us.

It worked for a while, but soon Sprite's own focus groups revealed that kids were getting wise to this anti marketing marketing campaign.

They had Grant Hill telling you not to listen to some celebrity telling you to drink a beverage, right?

Well, that's what you're doing.

You're listening to Grant Hill telling you to drink Sprite, right?

I don't know how much they probably paid all those stars to come on and say, don't listen to what a star says.

So Sprite crossed an entirely new threshold into the innermost sanctum of teen culture, where they cloaked themselves in genuine cool.

Hip hop for us became the sort of vehicle or the lens for us to get to teens and talk to them in a credible way.

And the way we did that was to develop relationships with artists.

They all of a sudden put their arm around that kid that was drinking Sprite.

And so we understand you, we recognize you.

We we want to be part of your life and not just please drink our product.

They almost weren't even selling the product.

They were selling the fact that they understood the culture.

They were selling a lifestyle.

And I think that's why Sprite's been so successful.

And one of the leaders in terms of reaching youth.

Former record executives Jon Cohn and Rob Stone run a New York marketing firm called Cornerstone.

Their specialty is under the radar marketing.

For instance, Cornerstone hires kids to log in to chat rooms and pose as just another fan of one of their clients.

And that's what the focus group is about.

They also recruit incoming freshmen to throw parties where they pass out promotional material to their classmates.

If we're, you know, maybe we've got a bunch of promo Busta Rhymes kids, and that'll be great to give out at the at the hip hop concert.

Cornerstone helps Sprite tap a network of radio DJs and hip hop artists to smuggle their message into the world of kids.

The days of developing cute campaigns or whatever don't.

They don't work anymore.

You have to really get involved in what their culture is.

You have to understand where they're coming from.

You have to think how they think it worked.

Thanks to the teens who buy it, Sprite is now the fastest growing soft drink in the world.

Sprite invited us to a kickoff party for their new website, Sprite.

Com.

Scores of kids were paid to show up and revel in the sounds and styles of urban authenticity.

While we were there, some of the biggest acts in rap music appeared on stage under the company logo.

Here it was the ultimate marriage of a corporation and a culture.

Sprite and hip hop had become one in the same.

Each carrying the other to its audience.

Sprite has really become an icon.

It's not just associated with hip hop.

It's really a part of it as much as baggy jeans and sneakers.

Sprite has become an icon in hip hop culture.

Is it nostalgic to think that when we were young it was any different that the thing we called youth culture wasn't something that was just being sold to us?

It was something that came from us, an act of expression, not just of consumption.

Has that boundary been completely erased?

Today, five enormous companies are responsible for selling nearly all of youth culture.

These are the true merchants of cool.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Disney.

Viacom.

Universal Vivendi and AOL Time Warner.

The entertainment companies, which are a handful of massive conglomerates that own four of the five music companies that sell 90% of the music in the United States.

Those same companies also in all the film studios, all the major TV networks, all the TV stations, pretty much in the ten largest markets, they own all or part of every single commercial cable channel.

They look at the teen market as part of this massive empire that they're colonizing.

You should look at it like the British Empire or the French Empire in the 19th century.

Teens are like Africa.

You know, that's this this range that they're going to take over.

And their weaponry are films, music books, CD's, Internet access, clothing, amusement parks, sports teams.

That's all this weaponry.

They have to make money off of this market.

Of the five media giants, the coolest conglomerate on the block is Viacom.

And Viacom's crown jewel.

They are on the second floor is MTV, which last year earned the company $1,000,000,000 in profits.

MTV launched 20 years ago with a simple but brilliantly commercial concept Use record companies promotional music videos as creative programming.

We can't rewind.

We've gone too far.

Since then, the cable channel has grown into a youth marketing empire, but its basic business model has remained the same.

Everything on MTV is a commercial.

That's all that MTV is.

Sometimes it's an explicit advertisement paid for by a company to sell a product.

Sometimes it's going to be a video for a music company there to sell music.

Sometimes it's going to be the set that's filled with trendy clothes and stuff.

There to sell a look that will include products on that set.

Sometimes it will be a show about an upcoming movie paid for by the studio, though you don't know it.

To hype a movie that's coming out from Hollywood, but everything's an infomercial.

There is no non-commercial part of MTV.

This strategy keeps MTV's airwaves filled with cheap and easy content.

Now there's over there doing this thing.

Let's check in with him.

All right.

Let's see what they're doing over there.

Take MTV's daily program, Direct Effects.

See anything familiar?

That's the Sprite dot com party we showed you earlier.

We didn't know it at the time, but the camera swirling over our heads belonged to MTV, and it happened to Sprite dot com launch party.

It's crazy.

And right now I got two of the hottest in hip hop for you right now.

So let's connect the dots.

Sprite rents out the Roseland Ballroom and pays kids 50 bucks a pop to fill it up and look cool.

The rap artists who perform for this paid audience get a plug on MTV's show, Direct Effects, for which Sprite is a sponsor.

MTV gobbles up the cheap programming, promoting the music of the record companies who advertise on their channel.

Everybody's happy.

But while this cross-promotional free for all may maximize returns for MTV and Viacom, it also violates the first rule of cool.

Don't let your marketing show.

MTV learned this lesson the hard way a few years ago when their ratings began to slip.

There was a perception that MTV had lost its way a bit with the young consumer.

Ratings were down somewhat.

Some of the trend studies said that we were less cool, less creative than before.

So MTV had the humility to realize that cool was not their birthright, that it belongs to kids, and kids keep changing.

If they want it to stay cool, they'd have to change right along with them.

MTV felt like we needed to get a closer connection to the audience, but we said if we know more about them, know more about their lives, know more about who they are, what they want, what they don't want, we can make a better MTV as a better connection with the audience if we talk to them and listen to them a lot more.

We immersed ourselves in research about the fall of 97 and have been able to turn that around to where now our rankings, when it comes to creative or original or funky or anything you would care about, musically relevant have went way, way up and our ratings of their highest in their history breaking ago.

The new MTV is all about learning what kids really want than delivering it to them.

Their signature show, Total Request Live plays, music videos by popular demand, and every afternoon, mobs of kids crowd into Times Square to gaze up at the windows of the TRL studio to see whichever mega band might be making a guest appearance.

Today, it's a TRL favorite.

Rap metal artists Limp Bizkit, whose videos are frequently voted into the top ten.

More on them later.

It's really the first time MTV was able to give over the control of a show to the viewers and say, you know, you tell us what you want to hear, what you want to see, what the videos are.

And they've been in control of it since it went on the air.

So I think that's one of the reasons that it's really important to us and it's really important to the audience because there's a real bond.

Yeah.

This new CD, Grandad, To ensure that Bond stay strong, MTV must understand where teen culture is moving.

Market research is the mantra, and its guru is Todd Cunningham.

Some of this music is dead on for exactly what kind of stuff that our audience is going to want.

And the research efforts at MTV are certainly legendary.

There's been a kind of feverish addiction to research and understanding young people, and that's been embraced from the very top down.

MTV let us in on their techniques.

Todd Cunningham told us to meet him at an address in the small town of Iselin, New Jersey.

A short time after we arrived, a black town car pulled up.

Cunningham, a former advertising industry executive, emerged with a member of his staff.

This little field trip, Cunningham had explained, is called an ethnography study in which MTB market researchers visit a typical fan in his home.

Hey.

Today, MTV is meeting Jon, an ordinary kid in every respect, who was carefully screened to make sure he is just that.

It is hoped that by studying John in his natural habitat, MTV might gain insight into one of the most valuable segments of their viewing demographic.

The teenage male I'd love to see like clothes.

Like, what's your favorite thing you have?

What's the favorite shirt?

Probably one of my sweaters during my drawers.

If you want to see them.

Well, we can look at that in a minute.

What else?

What else?

What kind of things do you wear?

Usually, like what's I wear a lot of, like, khaki pants.

Yeah.

And I have some suits for church or whatever.

We shut the door in their bedrooms and talk to them about issues that they feel like are really important to them.

We talk with them about what it's like to date today, what it's like dealing with their parents, what things stress them out the most.

What things are like really on the hearts and minds of their them and their peers.

I'm just curious about like things with like, you know, obviously you want just like with your girlfriend and stuff like that.

And I mean, this is we always just ask these kind of questions about are you like, how long have you guys been dating?

Since June 1st.

It's captured on video, so we have a camera crew sound and like crew there.

We cut that videotape together, put it to music, edit it in an MTV style way.

We then take that around and show it to various department meetings, share with them the insights that we've learned.

>> So what happens to all this careful research, all the hours and dollars that MTV spends learning about who our kids really are?

When all the tape is reviewed, what portrait of the American teenage male emerges?

Oh, God.

How do you know Millais?

His critics call him the mook.

That's right.

Moke Mook.

And you can find him almost any hour of the day or night somewhere on MTV.

He's not real.

He's a character.

Crude, loud, obnoxious and in-your-face.

Na na na na na na na na.

He's Tom Green of the Tom Green Show.

There's a sewage plant in my anus and it stinks.

And he's the daredevils on Jackass who indulge in dignity, defying feats like poo diving right down to scuba diving.

Oh, bro.

He's those frat boys in their whipped cream bikini girlfriends on MTV's constantly recurring spring break specials.

What brand of pants am I wearing?

Let me see.

>> He has migrated to MTV's sister network, Comedy Central, where he's the cartoon cutouts of South Park or the lads on the man show.

The judges look nice, don't they?

And those means the movie is perhaps Viacom's most bankable creation.

Once programmers discovered his knack with teenage boys, they replicated him across the length and breadth of their empire.

Oh, my goodness.

Grab my head.

Grab my take.

Howard Stern.

Perhaps the original and still king of all MOOCs.

Look how Viacom leverages him across their properties.

He is syndicated on 50 of Viacom's Infinity Radio stations.

His weekly TV show is broadcast on Viacom, CBS.

His number one best selling autobiography was published by Viacom's Simon and Schuster.

Then released as a major motion picture by Viacom's Paramount Pictures, grossing $40 million domestically and millions more on videos sold at Viacom's blockbuster video.

Go ahead.

Tell me more about me.

All right.

So does the whole teenage experience come down to this?

Are our boys mooks?

Is Jon a amuck?

I don't think so.

Maybe all that research isn't really about understanding John as a person.

It's about understanding John as a customer.

I mean, they don't call it human research or people research.

They call it market research.

The MTV machine does listen very carefully to children when corporate revenues depend on being ahead of the curve.

You have to listen.

You have to know exactly what they want and exactly what they're thinking so that you can give them what you want them to have.

Now, that's an important distinction.

The MTV machine doesn't listen to the young, so it can make the young happier.

It doesn't listen to the young.

So it can come up with, you know, startling new kinds of music.

For example, the MTV machine tunes in so it can figure out how to pitch what Viacom has to sell.

Crotch, crotch, crotch.

There is no mook in nature.

He is a creation designed to capitalize on the testosterone driven madness of adolescence.

He grabs them below the belt and then reaches for their wallets.

Watch my crotch.

What MTV is struggling with is what's going on with all our cultural industries.

We have fewer and fewer owners, but more and more choices, so they have to desperately find ways to keep people looking for gimmicks.

And they don't have a huge time frame to establish an identity with a remote control.

You know, your your shelf life of chances to keep someone to get them to stay there.

It's very short.

You can't develop a character over six weeks.

They're going to be gone after 2 minutes.

So it puts pressure on commercial culture providers like MTV to try to find sort of things that their research shows will click right away, recognizable things and play on those.

It's funny to think that the most advanced form of marketing today comes in the form of a £300 body slam.

Professional wrestling.

Is the most popular form of entertainment among teenage boys in America.

When I was a kid, wrestling was an amusing little outpost of the culture.

Today, wrestling is sheer spectacle, a magnificently honed lure for the teenage male channel surfer.

The wrestlers themselves have a word for it.

Pop, pop means when that crowd pops, when they react, Wow, It's like a shock reaction.

You know, something that, you know, they didn't really expect it.

So you may get that big surprise out of them.

You know, just like when you you catch somebody coming around the corner and you jump out and they go, whoa!

It's the same thing, you know?

Spears somebody that's a big pop, you know?

Wow.

>> And where there's pop, there's money.

That's why wrestling has been propagated across the entire spectrum of teen media.

It's broadcast 15 hours a week on five different networks and is seen by 15 million people.

Wrestling's violence doesn't scare me.

It's ubiquity, does It is huge with our audience at sort of program levels that I could have never imagined.

It is the hottest thing going among males 18 to 24 and in fact, among teen boys.

And so we felt like, wow, we don't want that to be the defining element of our business.

It was okay to be in the game.

It was simply too big to ignore.

That's what it was when you got a few gigantic transnational corporations, each one loaded down with debt, competing madly for as much shelf space and brain space as they can take.

They are going to do whatever they think works the fastest and with the most people, which means that they will drag standards down and girls get dragged down there right along with boys.

The media machine has spit out a second caricature.

Perhaps we can call this stereotype the midriff.

The midriff is no more true to life than the Mook.

If he is arrested in adolescence, she is prematurely adult.

If he doesn't care what people think of him, she is consumed by appearances.

If his thing is crudeness, hers is sex.

The midriff is really just a collection of the same old sexual cliches, but repackaged as a new kind of female empowerment.

I am midriff.

Hear me roar.

I am a sexual object, but I'm proud of it.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

The midriff archetype is undoubtedly teenage megastar Britney Spears, whose latest album, Oops I Did It Again, has sold over 8 million copies.

Oh, you won it.

She hit the scene at 16 with baby one more time as a naughty Catholic schoolgirl bursting out of her uniform.

When it came time for a spread in Rolling Stone.

A 17 year old self-professed virgin Britney struck the classic nymphet pose in a black.

Sergeant tells me.

And at the Video Music Awards last year, when Britney finally and famously came out of her clothes, she wasn't just pleasing eager young boys, she was delivering a powerful missive to girls.

Your body is your best asset.

Flaunt your sexuality even if you don't understand it.

And that's the message that matters most, because Britney's most loyal fans are teenage girls.

I think I did it.

Oh, can I use that?

Sure.

Do you believe in more than just spend?

We met Barbara and her friends at the New York Hilton, where they were preparing for the opportunity to step into the roles of midriffs themselves.

I want to be a model.

I want to be an actor.

I want people to notice me and just be like, Wow, she is pretty.

I have to look good for people if I need to look good.

Like, if I don't look good for people, I'll be really upset and then, like, ruin my day.

So whenever I go out with friends, like, even just over to their house, I need to look good.

Two, three, one.

Barbara and hundreds of other girls have come here to the International Model and Talent Association's annual convention.

These girls have paid up to 4000 bucks a pop for the chance to be paraded before hundreds of agents and talent scouts on the lookout for new blood.

There have always been starry eyed girls like this, but what's new is their sophistication.

They learned how a midriff should talk, move and sell herself.

Hello.

My number is 7996.

Fruit of the Loom.

Bet you thought they were just for men.

Well, now there's new fruit of the loom.

Feminine style.

Because girls know a good thing when they see one.

Thank you.

Now it's time for 13 year old Barbara to prove she has what it takes.

Hold on.

Very good, John.

Barbara, what do you feel at your age?

Range is now 17.

What do you think it is?

Angela, We're in for me there in Fort Worth.

I am originally 13.

I think I can range to 16 or 17.

You are 13?

Yeah.

You're 13 years old.

Yeah.

What do you want to really do?

I'm interested in.

I would like to become successful.

Good girl.

I want to be an account contractor.

Someone or get an agent.

Let's say that you go to this convention and like nothing happened and no interest.

And what?

For some reason, I know that if I keep trying, I might get somewhere.

Yeah.

It was so nice to meet you.

Thanks, Barbara.

Good luck.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Barbara's just one of hundreds in this season's crop.

It's a bounty for Hollywood talent agents who have more vacancies for new midriffs every day.

Jeff Maroney has discovered some of the hottest teen stars in the business.

Perhaps his biggest discovery was an unknown teenager named Jessica Biel.

She was my client for five years, and I found her here.

She was on stage.

He was 12 years old.

Most people here weren't interested in her.

She didn't, I don't think, really went any awards.

And she was 12 years old and she was on she was like way too tall for her age.

And she was singing the lullaby of Broadway.

And I think doing pancakes or something like that.

And I just went, Oh my gosh, there's a star.

Jessica Biel's first big part was on a fledgling television network devoted to the teenager, the WB.

She played a minister's daughter on the wholesome teen drama Seventh Heaven.

Seventh Heaven was part of the WB's newly devised formula.

Radical by the standards of teen television.

Keep it clean.

Everyone else was going the edgy route, so maybe we ought to go completely different.

And there was about a year period where we went family friendly, and I think our slogan was where America's families can watch television together.

>> You have done so well, regaining your balance, getting back on track with your diet and exercise.

I'm very proud of you.

That was a novel approach at the time because except for maybe the wonderful world of Disney, the families could not watch television together.

So, you know, programming and marketing met and we thought that's going to be our angle.

But the WB's family friendly shows had to compete against programming like this.

The eye grabbing sex scenes of Beverly Hills 920 and other risque teen dramas.

Let's Take Off Our Clothes.

By its third season, the WB made a course change.

Based on their new trajectory.

Dawson's Creek, a show about a group of sex obsessed high school friends in an idyllic Cape Cod town.

On Dawson's first episode, one of its lead characters, 14 year old Pacey, begins a sexual affair with his teacher.

I'm sorry it had attractive teens, and it spoke to especially the female audience.

But the same time, the news weeks and the time magazines were writing about this rather risque show where a 14 year old boy was having a romance with this teacher.

You needed that plotline to really give it a bang, to give it a bang.

So, Jen, you a virgin?

That's mature because Dawson is a virgin and two virgins really makes for a clumsy first encounter in bringing teen sexual content to what had always been network TV's 8:00 Family Hour, Dawson's Creek and the WB made the headlines, however reluctantly.

They had raised the sexual stakes even further.

What would teens come to expect from TV now?

Who would top Dawson's?

MTV?

That's who.

By launching a new nighttime soap unambiguously entitled Undressed, dispensing with plot almost completely.

It's quick cut channel surf resistant vignettes draw their characters so thinly they nearly disappear.

Come here.

It's sex.

TV's answer to wrestling, stringing together explosions of pop to keep its teen audience hooked.

I'll give you something you've been obsessing about ever since our parents got married.

Meanwhile, at the Cineplex, amped up, efforts like Cruel Intentions were bringing unprecedented sexual sophistication to teen movies.

One of the biggest teen hits of 1999, Cruel Intentions, is the story of two spoiled step siblings.

She promises to sleep with him if he will sexually humiliate her rival.

>> You can put it anywhere.

Right here.

The audience will be freaking out.

Neil Moritz, the producer of Cruel Intentions, is one of the most successful teen impresarios in Hollywood.

I mean, I definitely want to push the envelope with my movies because to me, if you're making the same thing that everybody else is making, then you don't have much chance of getting people to come to your movies.

And for me, I love making movies.

And the only way I'm going to get to be able to keep making movies is by making movies that do business down.

Boy, a movie like I Have Cruel Intentions, where we go off and we make it for $12 million.

We do 40 million here, we do 60 million overseas.

There's $100 million in box office, plus all the ancillary markets, whether it be videocassette or cable or all these other markets.

You know, there's tremendous streams of revenue coming in.

Morris's films have come under intense scrutiny for their sex and violence.

One was even included in a government investigation because it was test marketed to 11 and 12 year olds.

Still, he makes no apologies about going for the jugular.

I think what you can't do is play down to the teenagers, play down to the young people.

No teenager is going to be satisfied with a PG 13 rated horror film.

Okay?

They want to see the blood and guts.

That's what they wanted to do.

They want to see the slasher element of those films.

And you can't do that the way they want to see it and get a PG 13 rating.

But but even those with the best of intentions get caught in the downward spiral of sex and violence.

We noticed a kind of schizophrenia on the set of Dawson's Creek.

At times, the show feels like the Waltons injected with a dose of Beverly Hills 9210.

Two of its main characters are staunch virgins into their senior year of high school.

But as if to keep the show cool, everyone around them is either having sex or talking about it incessantly.

Running tally of all the losers fainted.

Oh, little ones are stuck with it.

What do you think kids talk about?

What do you think teenagers talk about?

Teenagers talk about sex.

Teenagers are consumed with sex.

It is my personal opinion that teenagers should not be having sex.

But.

But they are.

They're confronted with it in terms of advertising.

And they see it on television in in primetime shows.

And in fact, in daytime shows, we have really taken sex responsibly.

I feel WB has and tried to portray ramifications of it.

Why and how and when and where to say no.

Dawson's writers and producers are aware that this is treacherous terrain.

Here they are in a production meeting getting a lesson in accountability from a team of teen sex experts called The Media Project.

Give me a good comeback line.

If a guy says wearing a condom doesn't feel good.

Oh, come on.

You're writers.

I got one.

They got.

Neither does herpes.

28 year old Greg Berlanti is executive producer of Dawson's Creek.

Why not lean into the fact that that that these kind of topics are being discussed?

Why not be aware of that?

And through that awareness, help kids to redefine and help people to redefine how they deal with that information.

As opposed to trying to put another finger in the dam when it's going to bust.

The makers of teen TV argue that they're only reflecting the real world.

Sex is a part of teens lives, so it better be in their media, too.

Media is just a mirror after all.

Or is it?

Take your bomb.

Bomb, bomb.

It seemed everyone wanted to show off their bum last year.

Take the annual migration of college and high school kids to spring break.

For the past 15 years, MTV has packaged spring break into a staged television performance and then repackaged it through the year on show after show.

Hop on and write them around.

Kids are invited to participate in sexual contests on stage or are followed by MTV cameras through their week of debauchery.

Sure some kids have always acted wild, but never have these antics been so celebrated on TV.

So of course, kids take it as a cue, like here on the strip in Panama Beach, Florida, where high schoolers carry on in public as if they were on some MTV soundstage.

Who was mirroring whom?

Real life and TV life have begun to blur.

Is the media really reflecting the world of kids or is it the other way around?

The answer is increasingly hard to make out.

I'll never forget the moment that 13 year old Barbara and her friend spotted our crew during a party between their auditions.

They appeared to be dancing for us, for our camera.

As if to sell back to us, the media, what we had sold to them.

And that's when it hit me.

It's a giant feedback loop.

The media watches kids and then sells them an image of themselves.

Then kids watch those images and aspire to be that mook or midriff in the TV set.

And the media is there watching them do that in order to craft new images for them and so on.

Is there any way to escape the feedback loop?

These kids believe they have.

Downtown Detroit on Halloween night.

A few thousand mostly white young men have gathered to hear a concert by their favorite hometown band, Insane Clown Posse.

ICP helped found a musical genre called Rap Metal or Rage Rock, which has created a stir across the country for its shock lyrics and ridicule of women and gays.

Yeah, that's right, motherfucker.

Who's going to be fucking?

Where are you going?

Who's going to be hot?

Who's going to be any kind of motherfucker?

Yeah, right.

Subcultures like this are increasingly rare in America.

A true underground where kids feel spurned by mainstream culture.

And like it, a lot of people seem to seem to sense like anger coming off Juggalos because there's a lot of, like, middle finger stuff.

And who's the middle finger to the middle finger is that everybody who doesn't understand what we're doing to the world, to the mainstream people who don't understand people like these, people who drive by honking their horns, drive by, laughing at us, we don't care.

And that's through the middle fingers and the fuck user forum the fuck.

I mean, to hell with society, you know?

I mean, we worry about society and what they think they control what goes on in our bedroom.

You know what we dress like, what our hair color is, Why let it control it here?

This is where we have fun.

By 65, at least with rock music has always channeled rebellion.

But where it used to be directed against parents, teachers or the government, today it is directed against slick commercialism itself, against MTV.

These fans feel loyalty to this band and this music because they experience it as their own.

It hasn't been processed by corporations, digested into popular culture and sold back to them at the mall.

Everybody that likes our music feels a super connection.

That's why all those Juggalos here, they feel so connected to it because it's exclusively theirs.

So when something's on the radio, it's for everybody, you know what I mean?

It's everybody's song.

Oh, this is my song.

That ain't your song.

It's on the radio.

It's everybody's song.

But to listen to ICP, you feel like you're the only one that knows about it.

Let's get to the basics.

These are the extremes to which teens are willing to go to ensure the authenticity of their own scene.

It's the front line of teen cultural resistance.

Become so crude, so intolerable, and break so many rules that you become indigestible.

Have you felt that Tumblr Rage rock is a double dog dare to the mainstream marketing machine?

Just try to market this.

And the thing is, that's exactly what they've done.

Consider the engineered rise of Limp Bizkit.

Remember them?

It turns out that the nastiest expressions of youth culture are manna to an industry ravenous for anything authentic to sell.

Biscuit is a rage rock band that leaves critics cold but ignites fans with incendiary lyrics.

America first got to know them at Woodstock 99.

Rage Rock's Coming Out party as covered by MTV, is just one of those guys.

The heat burned on and conditions grew more intolerable.

And for some angry concertgoers, songs like Limp Bizkit's break stuff became a mantra.

Trying to reach deep down inside.

How does a band like them become superstars?

Follow this well-tested recipe.

Always on the lookout for the rawest of raw material.

Jimmy Iovine, the enormously successful head of Interscope Records, finds a controversial band and packages them for the mainstream, all the while claiming he's just responding to demand.

There's no way to stop.

A a movement in popular culture.

There's just no way to stop it.

It's going to happen with or without you.

There's absolutely no way to stop that train.

But when an Oregon radio station shied away from the band's crass lyrics, Interscope paid them to play one of Biscuits songs 50 times.

Then Interscope funded Biscuits First video, which was premiered on MTV's nod to Democracy Total Request Live.

I mean, I guess you could say total Request Live is democratic in the way that, you know, this year's election was Democratic.

The candidates, the field of candidates is very small, and there are organizations behind them, not unlike the Democratic and Republican parties who are deciding which candidates get promoted.

So, in other words, you can't just be, you know, Joe, fabulous, who's releasing your little indie record and get on Total Request live?

Having declared them worthy of a slot on TRL.

MTV now also had a stake in making Limp Bizkit stars.

The network put the band on their spring break special.

When Spring Break aired, you could see a sales change the following week.

And that's the kind of reaction that a killer performance at spring break gives your hands up.

One part authentic rage, two parts marketing.

Sprinkle with cash and place in a preheated oven called Woodstock 99.

The night after Biscuits performance, the festival erupted in flames.

The band's goading of the crowd was blamed, perhaps unfairly, for the mayhem which ensued by the time the smoke had cleared.

Four young women reported being raped.

But the band had made the big time Biscuits.

Lead singer became a senior vice president at Interscope Records, and the band's relationship with MTV had become so cozy that they put a picture of executive Dave Chernick in their album liner notes and made casual drop ins at their old stomping grounds, TRL.

I just happened to be in Times Square.

TRL was going on and I was like, Whoa, what time is it?

I was using my little two way that day and I got to right before the show started to aid Carson, he said, Come on out.

So when it came time to release a new album, Biscuit naturally turned to their friends at TRL to help sell it.

And sell it did faster than any rock album in history.

This is kind of an important moment, you guys being on TRL at some point today.

You know, it's weird to say millions of kids will go out and buy this record and thus a band is made.

Of course, it's impossible to know what would have happened to Limp Bizkit and Rage Rock, where MTV and Interscope Records not behind them.

It would be Limp Bizkit.

And you're watching TRL if you didn't notice already.

Perhaps they would have made it to the top on their own merits.

But that's just the point.

No one can ever know.

Once MTV and Interscope Records have placed their bets, the success of Limp Bizkit and Rage rock was all but preordained.

The cool hunt ends here, with teen rebellion itself becoming just another product.

Often there's a kind of official and systematic rebelliousness that's reflected in in media products pitched at kids.

It's part of the official rock video worldview.

It's part of the official advertising worldview that your parents are creeps.

Teachers are nerds and idiots.

Authority figures are laughable.

Nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor.

That huge authority has, interestingly enough, emerged as the sort of tacit superhero of consumer culture.

That's the coolest entity of all.

So is there anywhere the commercial machine won't go?

Is it leaving any room for kids to create a culture of their own?

Do they even have anything that's theirs alone?

All eyes are on our kids.

They know they're being watched.

But what or whom can they look to themselves?

And what if they turn and fight?

The battle itself is sponsored, packaged and sold right back to them.

Oh, and by the way, those rebels in clown makeup from Detroit.

Yes.

Oh, my God.

Look like they've signed with a major label, produced some slick music videos, even got themselves on World Championship wrestling.

And lo and behold, their latest album, hit number 20 on the charts.

Welcome to The Machine.

Explore more of the symbiotic relationship between the media and today's teens on Frontline's website.

You'll find more on a day in the life.

Hundreds.

The extended interviews, a closer look at the five media giants and their clout with teens.

Some reactions from teens to our program, a quiz streaming video.

And for teachers, a guide to get your students engaged in this subject.

Then join the discussion.

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He yells, I'll cap you, mother.

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We have, Brooke.

We were allowed to become cops, LAPD blues.

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